Only Mine by Elizabeth Lowell Page B

here, Wolfe thought grimly. I could use a good man at my back right now.
    A motion at the edge of Wolfe’s vision caught his eye. It was Jessica’s long skirts being whipped by the wind. She was headed for the station building rather than the empty stage.
    “Jessi!”
    She didn’t even look back.
    Wolfe began running, but it was the stage he headed for, not Jessica. He knew he had no chance of reaching her before she got to the station house. He yanked open the stagecoach’s door and leaped inside with the agility of a cat. The leather presentation case that held the matched rifle and carbine was on the seat.
    Just as Jessica closed the station house door behind her, she looked back, expecting Wolfe to be on her heels. When she saw that he wasn’t, she let out a sigh of relief. The sigh turned to a soundlessgasp when she turned to face the occupants of the room.
    Wolfe had been right. This wasn’t a place for a lady.
    It wasn’t the room’s dim, smoky interior, its filth, or its feral smell that put the place off limits for a lady. It was the intent masculine eyes measuring her the way a merchant measured gold dust, one soft bit at a time.
    A man who had been sitting apart from the others stood up from the uneven table and swept off his battered hat.
    “Something you need, ma’am?” he asked unhappily.
    Even in the bad light Jessica recognized the stagecoach driver’s long, bushy mustache. She smiled at him with relief, not realizing how beautiful her smile might be to men who hadn’t seen a white woman for months, much less one wearing a dress that had been sewn by expert seamstresses to fit her breasts and waist like a soft blue shadow. Even wrinkled and mussed from long travel, she was like an exotic flower blooming in the midst of winter.
    “I was chilled,” Jessica said softly. “I saw the smoke.”
    “Come on in,” one of the other men said, standing. He gestured toward the bench where he had been sitting. “All warmed up and ready to ride, like me.”
    Several of the men snickered.
    The man who had spoken should have been handsome. He was tall and well-proportioned, with even teeth and regular features. His clothes were frayed but well-made. He wore a heavy split riding coat. He was the only man who was cleanshaven. His posture was as proud as any gentleman’s.
    Yet there was something in the young man that made Jessica profoundly uneasy. His eyes were like the wind—colorless, empty, and cold. He was watching her with a reptilian intensity that made the skin on her arms ripple in a primitive comprehension of danger. She longed to be back in the stagecoach with Wolfe at her side.
    Jessica would have turned and fled, but she sensed with great certainty that showing weakness to this man would have the effect of dangling wounded prey in front of a pack of starving hounds.
    “My name’s Raleigh,” the young man said, tipping his hat in a gesture that was more familiar than polite, “but pretty gals mostly call me Lee.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Raleigh,” Jessica said with clipped formality, “but it’s not necessary for you to give up your seat. Just being in out of the wind is enough for me.”
    “Nonsense,” he said, coming toward Jessica. “Come over here where it’s warm.” He kicked one of the men’s feet on the way by. “Steamer, get off your butt and get the pretty English miss some grub.”
    “Scots,” she said softly, forcing herself to be calm when every nerve in her body screamed for her to flee.
    “What?”
    “I’m Scots.”
    Raleigh smiled thinly as he reached for Jessica’s arm. “Whatever you say, lassie. Now get your pretty self over here and tell me what a girl like you is doing in Cross-Eyed Joe’s place.”
    The door behind Jessica opened, letting in a cold blast of wind.
    Wolfe stepped inside. He looked out of place in his city clothes. In the muted light, the silver and gold inlay on the carbine shimmered like water. The effect was like that of a snake’s scales,